HUGH FLEETWOOD was born in England in 1944. At the age of 18 he went to live in France; at 21, he moved to Italy, where he remained for the next fourteen years. He had his first exhibition in 1970 at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto; in 1971 he published his first novel, A Painter of Flowers, for which he also designed the jacket. As he did for his second novel, The Girl Who Passed for Normal, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. His fifth novel, The Order of Death, was made into a film (a.k.a. Corrupt in the U.S.) starring Harvey Keitel and John Lydon. (Johnny Rotten). After his return to England, Hugh Fleetwood had two further one-man shows, at the St. Raphael Gallery in London, and most recently has designed the jacket for his last novel, The Dark Paintings, and for an anthology of short stories, A Casualty of War, published by Arcadia Press in September 2008. Hugh Fleetwood currently lives in London.